The Apple Pay announcement finally came yesterday and the company's orchestration of much of the complex and fractious card payments ecosystem demonstrates Apple's insight into how the current payments ecosystem works and how it must be aligned in order to meet its...
The recent entry of Amazon.com into the small merchant mobile POS card acceptance market may signal the last phase of increasing hostility in the US merchant acquiring segment of the card payments business. Prior to the launch of Square in 2010, the merchant acquiring...
In various venues — our Payments Bootcamp, our private client sessions or our merchant group meetings — we have talked a lot about MCX, the Merchant Customer Exchange initiative, created by a number of the largest US retailers to establish a merchant-centric wallet...
Bilateral Adoption Claims Another Victim Word came earlier this week that Square had sunset its consumer-facing app, Square Wallet. The app had pioneered one of the great parlor tricks in payments, enabling a merchant using the Square Register POS app to recognize...
One of the pleasures of joining Glenbrook has been getting to know what and how the other Glebrookers think about what's happening in the payments industry. We talk a lot at Glenbrook. Over iChat, email, mobile phones, Skype, Google Hangout with voice and video,...
As we move into 2014 – yet (again) the year when many say mobile payments are destined to gain traction – let’s look at some key developments in the space. No, I’m not talking about the newest pilot participant in ISIS or whether Apple will be the new sheriff in town....
Our clients are starting to ask us who we think is going to win the mobile wallet war in 2014. Questions like: What’s happening with the Isis rollout? What’s the next likely step in the evolution of the Google Wallet? Is PayPal’s In-Store initiative getting any...
Just before the 4th of July holiday, Felix Salmon, finance blogger at Reuters, wrote an insightful piece, sharply critical of mobile payments and the long anticipated ability of our clever smartphones and wireless communications to improve upon a simple plastic...
I’m just back from a trip to Brazil and while I was there, the government introduced long-awaited legislation on mobile payments. This is an important task as Brazil now has 265 million mobile subscribers – more than 1 per inhabitant. Needless to say, the...
Here are some thoughts on big actions that industry incumbents could take to strengthen their positions and the U.S. payments industry. What do these ideas have in common? First of all, they are infrastructural or market-wide. Secondly, they all ask one or more...
